CHAPTER 13

Courbet in His Element

IT IS NOT EASY TO SAY WHAT THE COMMUNE WAS. LIKE an Impressionist painting seen too close, it never really coalesced. In essence, it was a hastily improvised urban government, hamstrung from the beginning by limited resources and highly precarious security, but with vast ambitions. It was radical, in the sense that what it wanted, if enacted, would amount to drastic change. But in other ways it was surprisingly prosaic. Rather than global revolution, its supporters wanted municipal autonomy.

The Commune’s older leaders and supporters carried over a sense of unfinished business from the revolutionary year of 1848. Others still looked back to the unmet promise of 1789. But in essence, the Communards wanted their city back—as much from Haussmann’s rational and merchant-friendly overhaul (which had displaced so many of the working poor) as from Napoleon III, the Government of National Defense, and the Prussians. The Commune’s leaders hoped that localized autonomy would evolve and catch on more widely, that it would form the basis of a democratic republic. And this in turn would have economic implications: it would provide people with “a system of communal insurance against all social risks”—including bankruptcy and unemployment. Already exacerbated by the siege, these last two problems had been turned into a crisis by Thiers’s decision to end the moratorium on the collection of rents and debts.

Supporters of the Commune, in other words, wanted more than just a share of power. They wanted their lives to be improved. They wanted the alleviation of crippling poverty and a better and fairer system of education, including for girls. And many of them—none more than Courbet—wanted to loosen the death grip of conservatism on the arts.

In some aspects, the Commune’s new emphasis on municipal autonomy worked admirably. “I have never seen the streets of Paris so well swept,” marveled Reverend William Gibson of the Methodist Mission. Yet from the beginning, the Commune struggled to bring substance or even a sense of appropriate priority to its wish list, which became longer by the day. Sixty-four representatives had been elected to its governing body. Some were political novices with odd backgrounds and unusual beliefs. But in fact, the majority were not wild-eyed, zealous revolutionaries. They were, as Rupert Christiansen has written, “respectable, earnest, public-spirited citizens, who worked for their bread and lived by traditional bourgeois values.” The average age was thirty-eight. Half of the elected representatives were artisans—masons, carpenters, and so on. A quarter were from middle-class backgrounds. And as many as three-quarters were not actually born in Paris. A third had been on the committee of the National Guard.

What the Communards lacked was a charismatic leader—someone invested with the authority to act, who could resolve, either through mandate or through negotiated compromise, the inevitable and innumerable conflicts that arose. The followers of Proudhon, the man who coined the phrase “property is theft” and was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, outnumbered the followers of Blanqui, a socialist who was more concerned with overthrowing the given order than in establishing a new society. But both these rival camps were in fact minorities. Although Blanqui was elected leader, the gesture was purely symbolic: he remained in detention in Versailles, having been condemned to death for his role in the attempted coup of October 31. Thiers simply ignored demands for his release. In Blanqui’s absence, no one else was prepared—or able—to take charge.

So the Commune’s authority was split between the Central Committee of the National Guard, which had been formed on March 20 and cast itself as the “guardian of the revolution,” and the Commune proper, elected on March 26. The principle of local authority meant that the members of the Commune’s council, all men, were also leaders of their local arrondissements. They relayed decisions made locally to the main council. But tensions between the main ideological factions were felt from the beginning. The Proudhonists (of whom Courbet was one) were opposed to states of any kind. They wanted the local arrondissements to retain their independence and function as conduits for a popular democracy. The Jacobins on the council believed chaos would ensue from so much local authority—particularly while the Commune was under extreme duress from the outside—and wanted to impose a more centralized structure.

ALL THE COMMUNE’S reforms were introduced against a backdrop of imminent attack. In Versailles, Thiers was rallying forces. His aim was to snuff out what was cast both as an insurrection and as an attempt by Paris to secede from the rest of France. He knew his German counterpart would find the Commune as intolerable as he did. Bismarck was in no hurry to let the French Army reconstitute itself, but he knew that the Commune would refuse to honor the terms of the treaty. So in early April, under pressure from Thiers, he agreed to release 100,000 French prisoners of war. The soldiers were slow to return from Germany, and for several weeks Thiers’s forces remained in disarray. He knew better than anyone that retaking Paris would be difficult; it was he, after all, who had overseen the building of the fortifications. So before he attacked, he had to be sure of victory. Any action would have to be decisive. And to prevent a repeat, it had to be punitive.

Thiers had appointed Patrice de MacMahon—who had been wounded while leading the French forces at Sedan—as his commander in chief. As generals, he appointed two other Legitimists, two Bonapartists, and one conservative republican. In the meantime, he did all he could to improve his forces’ morale, to enhance their equipment and living conditions, and to saturate them in anti-Commune propaganda. The most widely read newspapers depicted the Parisian radicals as, according to John Merriman, “the dregs of society, ex-convicts, drunks, vagabonds and thieves, foreigners turned loose by virtue of fiendish plots organized by the International, perhaps in cahoots with Germany.” The two sides skirmished from the beginning of April.

INCREDIBLY, PARIS WAS besieged again. Its remaining residents faced the very same reality they had so recently escaped: Supplies of food were cut off. Egress was denied. The threat of attack was constant. The result was an atmosphere of suffocation and paranoia, which certain Communard leaders—most prominently Raoul Rigault, the new chief of police—were ready to exploit. In the course of just ten days, between March 18 and 28, Rigault—an avid reader of books about the Terror and an aficionado of modern police tactics—had more than four hundred people arrested. MacMahon, in Versailles, was almost as ruthless, hunting down anyone suspected of treachery. Executions became commonplace on both sides. Each one escalated the levels of loathing, constituting one more point of no return for the other side.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, according to his son the filmmaker Jean, wanted to escape Paris after the Commune’s establishment. He might easily have been shot had he not secured help from Rigault. Before the war, Renoir had one day been painting outdoors at Fontainebleau when, out of the blue, he had encountered Rigault, who was on the run from Napoleon III’s police. Having worked at Rochefort’s weekly newspaper La Marseillaise, Rigault was a republican. Renoir gave him a disguise and helped him hide in the city. He then spoke to Pissarro, who contacted Rigault’s friends, and they helped organize his escape from Paris. Now it was Rigault who wielded power and Renoir who wanted to make a getaway. Rigault was more than happy to oblige. He organized papers to secure Renoir’s passage out of the city and even ordered a band to strike up “La Marseillaise” in his honor.

Anticipating an attempt to retake Paris by force, the Communards erected barricades all over the city. Strongholds bristling with cannons were established on the crest of Montmartre, at the Panthéon, and at the Trocadéro. This western part of Paris was home to some of its wealthiest residents, most of them Thiers supporters. So when, in the first week of April, Thiers began to bombard the city from the west, they were dismayed to find their arrondissements bearing the brunt of the shelling.

So inspired was Courbet by the Commune’s establishment that he seemed blind to the wider predicament. For decades he had been championing the very ideas now being enacted. “This revolution is all the more just,” he wrote, “as it originates with the people. Its apostles are workers, its Christ was Proudhon.” In Courbet’s eyes, Paris was free while the rest of the country remained “in bondage.” But of course, the reverse was true, and no amount of ideological fervor could alter the fact that the residents of Paris were once again imprisoned and under bombardment.

Manet, Degas, and Morisot all remained sympathetic to the Commune and concerned about its fate. But they were also skeptical. Politically, Berthe had moved away from the convictions of her parents. She was anxious about the coming conflict but felt genuine sympathy for the radicals. Manet, meanwhile, was split. Born, like Berthe, into relative wealth, he was, like his brothers, alienated from his own privileged background and felt the justice of the radicals’ cause. Despising tyranny, he felt a compassionate rapport with the destitute and downtrodden and had painted the poor of Paris with real feeling and originality. As a teenager, he had been inspired by the revolutions of 1848. Like Courbet, he wanted art liberated from conservative dullness, stifling bureaucracy, and censorship. But he was not one for joining clubs or movements.

At the beginning of April, curious about the Commune, he had decided to return to Paris, only to be told that all entry and egress had been cut off. So he took to the road instead, traveling from Arcachon north along the coast through Royan (where he spent two days), then Rochefort (two days), La Rochelle (one day), Nantes (two days), Saint-Nazaire (two days), and finally Le Pouliguen, on the coast, where he stayed a month.

During that month, Paris fell apart.

WHEN, ON MARCH 30, Thiers’s Versaillais forces made a tentative advance toward the city at Neuilly, the Commune decided it was time to retaliate. Thiers discovered their plans. He still had only about sixty thousand troops at his disposal, but on April 2 he launched an attack at Courbevoie, across the Seine from Neuilly. The Communards met the onslaught with vigor, and at midnight, a Communard sortie pushed back across the river. Board fences in Montmartre and Belleville were plastered with announcements that “royalist conspirators” had “ATTACKED,” despite “the moderation of our attitude.” The Commune’s council anticipated that the Versaillais forces would either crumble or switch sides, induced by the same “fraternization” that had turned to their advantage in Montmartre two weeks earlier.

But nothing of the sort happened. From the upper windows of his home, Ambassador Washburne was astonished to find himself observing “a regular battle under the walls of Paris.” “Thank God!” wrote Goncourt. “Civil War has broken out. When things have reached this pass, civil war is preferable to hypocritical skullduggery.” Wandering away from the battlefield, Gustave Flourens, one of the Commune’s more colorful leaders, entered a hostel. He had led the October revolt against Trochu during the siege. Like Blanqui, he had been condemned to death for his troubles, but Thiers’s forces had been unable to arrest him. Now, as he entered the hostel, a Versaillais army officer immediately recognized him and was so infuriated that he dragged him outside, took out his sword, and split Flourens’s skull in two.

The Communards’ initial successes that April night were quickly reversed. Shells fired from Mont-Valérien tore through their forces, which soon fell back across the river in disarray. There were relatively few casualties, but the Versaillais took hundreds of Communards prisoner, and the victory boosted their morale.

After the fighting ended, a terrible thing happened: under a flag of truce, shots fired by the Communards killed General Vinoy’s beloved chief surgeon, Dr. Pasquier. The Communards claimed it was an error, but Thiers was in no mood to forgive and compared Pasquier’s killing to the murders of Lecomte and Clément-Thomas.

The next day hundreds of Parisian women staged a rally in the city. They had heard that the prisoners taken by Thiers’s forces were being summarily executed, and they planned to march peacefully all the way to Versailles. But the rebel National Guard held them back. Meanwhile the Commune’s council was so incensed by the stories of reprisals and summary executions that it passed a “Hostages Bill.” The idea was to intimidate Thiers into moderating his treatment of captured Communards. “Any person suspected of complicity with the government of Versailles,” declared the bill, “will be immediately charged and incarcerated.” Those found guilty (a jury would decide within forty-eight hours) would be held as hostages of the people of Paris. Linked to this declaration was a chilling threat: “any execution of a prisoner of war or a partisan of the legal government of the Commune of Paris will be immediately followed by the execution of a triple number of hostages.”

And so the cycle of reprisals began.

FUELED ON BOTH SIDES by cravings for vengeance, the story of the Paris Commune tumbled and tripped toward its atrocious denouement. “We are caught between two bands of madmen; those who sit at Versailles and those who are at the Hôtel de Ville,” Clemenceau said. Sincere attempts were made to de-escalate the conflict. At the beginning of April, moderates and supporters of Gambetta formed a group that tried to broker a compromise. But every attempt by leaders in Paris and Versailles to make concessions to the other side was denied.

So on April 4, a group of discontented Paris mayors founded the League of the Republican Union for the Rights of Paris, its manifesto signed by Édouard’s brother Gustave, by Clemenceau, and by various other politicians, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and journalists. All were republicans who were nonetheless worried by the extremism of the Commune. Trying to thread the needle, the league’s manifesto blamed “the obstinacy of the Assembly of Versailles in not recognizing the legitimate rights of Paris.” It made three proposals to the Assembly: that it recognize the republic, recognize the rights of Paris to govern itself by a freely elected council, and entrust the defense of Paris to the National Guard. On April 10, the league put out a second, distressed statement, calling for an end to “this fratricidal struggle.” It sent a series of delegations to Thiers. Thiers met with them, but he was intent only on buying time and would not yield.

Goncourt grew agitated—and more flagrantly sarcastic. “If Versailles does not hurry up,” he wrote, “we shall see the rage of defeat turn itself into massacres, shootings, and other niceties by these tender friends of humanity.” But Thiers had no choice but to go slowly. Civilians had fled Paris by the thousands. Meanwhile, a worrying number of army troops had defected to the Communards. Bismarck had released French prisoners of war, but the treaty still imposed limits on the size of the French Army. So Thiers deputized Favre to negotiate with Bismarck to allow for the increase deemed necessary for the army to retake Paris. Defeating the Commune, Favre stressed, was in Germany’s interests, since it was the only way the terms of the treaty would be met. Bismarck, who worried about the potential for the Commune to prove contagious and create problems back in Germany, agreed to let the Versaillais army grow by stages to 170,000. Meanwhile Rigault, the chief of police who had assisted Renoir, added a new name to the long list of “suspects” he’d been rounding up. On April 4, he arrested Monseigneur Georges Darboy, the archbishop of Paris, and threw him in solitary confinement in Mazas Prison.

As much as arguments over class or what form governments should take, attitudes toward the Catholic Church shaped the political upheavals of 1870–71. Where provincial France was steadfastly Catholic, most Communards saw the Church as power-hungry, corrupt, and avaricious. One of their first actions had been to mandate the separation of church and state. The arrest of Darboy, which was soon followed by the roundup of scores of priests, reflected an anticlericalism that now became increasingly fervent. The archbishop’s arrest was especially incendiary. Rigault had ordered it with a particular goal in mind: convinced that the Commune needed Blanqui’s leadership, he thought he could secure his release by using Darboy as a bargaining chip. But Thiers was having none of it.

As news of Darboy’s incarceration spread beyond Paris, it was met with ever-increasing dismay. It quickly came to seem so outrageous that even Victor Hugo wrote a poem, “Pas de représailles” (No Reprisals), in protest. Far from forcing an exchange, the episode only confirmed Thiers in his determination to refuse to negotiate. More than any other single action, it galvanized antipathy to the Communards’ cause.

Over the coming days, the Versaillais enjoyed a succession of victories against the Commune along the Seine, north of the Bois de Boulogne. And on April 8, having erected a bridge over the river, they took control of Neuilly.

MEANWHILE THE COMMUNE spat out edicts like a croupier dealing cards. One reintroduced the moratorium on rents. Another abolished military conscription and the police force, replacing both with a restructured National Guard. But it wasn’t until April 19 that the Commune published an actual manifesto. It was posted all over the city in the form of giant placards. No doubt because the word Commune sounds like Communist and because Karl Marx was one of the first to write about the events of 1871, some have seen the Commune as a progenitor of the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century. In some ways it was. But in more salient ways, it was different. The April 19 manifesto declared an agenda that was fiercely republican but as much libertarian as socialist. It focused on decentralization, local government autonomy, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and freedom of labor. The Communards wanted to dismantle any structures of power—governmental, religious, financial, military—that held people back. “The Communal Revolution,” declared the manifesto, “inaugurates a new political era, experimental, positive, scientific. It is the end of the old governmental and clerical world, of militarism, [of] monopolism [and] of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters.”

This rhetoric spoke powerfully to Gustave Courbet. Even as the Commune’s military predicament worsened, the painter-turned-administrator had never felt more optimistic. “Oh Paris! Paris, the great city has just shaken off the dust of all feudality,” he wrote on April 6. Instead of worrying about attacks from the direction of Versailles, he redoubled his efforts to establish an art infrastructure controlled not by government cronies but by artists. He wanted to initiate a new order in which “aristocratic” and “theocratic” art could no longer impede either freedom of expression or the operations of democracy. Accordingly, he offered up a long wish list. He proposed taking over the entire museum system (which he had been running during the siege), abolishing the system of medals of honor, and dismantling government-run art schools such as the École des Beaux-Arts and the French School in Rome. The rooms of the École des Beaux-Arts, he asserted, would be made available to art students who, instead of being brainwashed by members of a government-sanctioned establishment, could cultivate their own idea of art, having “totally free choice among their professors.”

Having set out his agenda, Courbet could now begin to enact it. He invited all artists in Paris to attend a meeting scheduled for April 10. Few made it, but unperturbed, Courbet rescheduled for two days later, and this time, more than four hundred artists attended. The result was the formation of the Federation of the Artists of Paris. Its manifesto, published in the Commune’s official journal, called for the establishment of a committee of forty-seven elected artists: sixteen painters, ten sculptors, ten industrial artists, six printmakers, and five architects. The committee would be in charge of Paris’s entire museum and art school infrastructure, and its mission would be threefold: conserving the art of the past, promoting the art of the present, and through education, cultivating the art of the future. Elections to the committee were held two days later at the Louvre.

Courbet’s program sounds radical, but hundreds of artists who had been excluded from official, government-sanctioned structures were impatient for exactly the kinds of reforms he was proposing. Manet, who had been agitating for change for years, was among them. His efforts had been coming to a head when the war with Prussia broke out, so Courbet assumed Manet and his posse of admirers, the future Impressionists, would back him. But he assumed too much. Manet, who was no longer even in Paris, was stunned to learn of his nomination to Courbet’s committee. On April 17—again in his absence and against his will—he was elected as a delegate to the new federation of artists. So were, among others, Corot, Daumier, and Millet, all in absentia. Six other elected artists who were in Paris, including Manet’s friend Bracquemond, promptly resigned.

Manet had enough problems with the establishment. Being openly associated with the Commune was not going to help him. Nor was he thrilled, on a more personal level, about being roped into the schemes of Courbet, an artist he admired but who was undoubtedly a rival and a general irritant. All the artists who wanted reform—Manet included—recognized Courbet’s role in liberating art from inherited orthodoxies. They may have laughed at his bluster, but they admired his courage and effrontery and recognized his tremendous impact, as the founder of Realism, on the art of the past few decades. But even those, like Manet, who were passionately republican didn’t necessarily subscribe to Courbet’s broader anarcho-socialist politics. And Courbet’s tendency to hog the limelight exasperated them. Manet had experienced this during the 1867 Exposition Universelle, when the two men, both excluded from the official exhibition, had set up their separate solo pavilions outside the fair: Courbet’s pavilion had been mobbed. Then, during the siege, while Manet had dutifully packed up his studio, enlisted in the National Guard, and sent forlorn private letters to Suzanne via balloon, the pacifist Courbet had used his notoriety to take control of Paris’s art institutions and issue dramatic public statements. Now he was a high-ranking functionary in a bona fide revolution, and he rejoiced.

For Courbet, political extremity represented opportunity. For Manet, it represented jeopardy. Like Berthe, he longed for a return to normality. Having made it through the hell of the siege, both were desperate to return to making art—a messy, lumbering business requiring time, focus, reliable supplies, and peace. They wanted social and political change, but by now they had seen enough of chaos and dysfunction. For Manet, this latest coup wasn’t something to cheer. The precariousness of the Commune—its illegality, its lack of clear leadership, its philosophical confusion—alarmed him as much as it worried Berthe, whose brother was in the army seeking to crush it. They balked at the Communards’ overreach and saw, with dread, the coming backlash.

UNPERTURBED—AND SEEMINGLY oblivious to the existence of divergent opinions—Courbet plowed ahead. Asked by the editor of Le Rappel to justify himself, he wrote a lengthy response. “Dear Citizen” (the term of address had become de rigueur),

I have been asked for a profession of faith. That must mean that, after thirty years of a publicly revolutionary and socialist life, I have not been able to get my ideas across. No matter, I will comply with this request. . . . I have been unswervingly occupied with the social question and the philosophies connected with it, choosing my own path, parallel to that of my comrade Proudhon. Renouncing the ideal as false and conventional, in 1848 I hoisted the flag of Realism, which alone places art at the service of man. . . . I have struggled against all forms of government that are authoritarian by divine right, for I want man to govern himself—according to his needs, for his direct benefit, and in accordance with his own ideas.

Courbet hoped that other governing bodies would follow the lead taken by his federation of artists. The more people could govern themselves according to their own interests, he wrote, “the more they will ease the task of the Commune.” Defining himself as an individualist, he advocated for decentralization wherever possible.

Courbet was now finally in a position to carry out what he had proposed at the beginning of the siege: the pulling down of the Vendôme Column. To veteran soldiers and to anyone with Bonapartist sympathies, the column was a sacred memorial, but anti-imperialists, revolutionaries, and pacifists hated it. In calling for its removal, Courbet had the Commune’s full support. But he was not out for pure destruction. He wanted to save the base and remove the bas-reliefs that wound their way up the column. These reliefs, which were made from melted-down and recast enemy cannons, should be carted, he proposed, to Les Invalides, Napoleon I’s final resting place and a hospital and retirement home for former army officers.

Such was the plan. But pulling down a structure that was 840 feet high was not easy to accomplish. The preparations took weeks. On April 18—the day Karl Marx was commissioned by the General Council of the International to write a pamphlet about the Paris Commune—Goncourt went to the Place Vendôme, where he saw scaffolding around the column in readiness for its destruction. The square, he wrote, had become “the center of a fantastic tumult and a medley of amazing [National Guard] uniforms.”

Goncourt, who was as conservative as Courbet was radical, found himself musing about an incipient outbreak of iconoclasm. This was not a good time, he suggested, to be an artist—or someone who cares about art. “From all I hear,” he wrote, “the employees of the Louvre are extremely worried.” The Venus de Milo, he continued, had been hidden “deep down” at the Prefecture of Police beneath piles of police dossiers, because Courbet was “on her track,” and the Louvre curators “fear the worst if the fanatical modernist lays his hands on the classical masterpiece.” This was a little too much. Courbet may have had a streak of fanaticism, but he was not out to destroy art. Nor is it clear that he was personally responsible for the decision to tear down the Vendôme Column. Certainly he had called for its removal the previous year. But the Commune issued its official decree, proposed by Félix Pyat, four days before Courbet even joined the Commune committee. Pyat had called the column “a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult to the conquered by the conquerors [and] a perpetual insult to one of the three great principles of the French Republic, Fraternity.” Courbet couldn’t have put it better himself, but he still wanted to preserve the parts of it that could be said to constitute art.

Courbet’s was a classic case of the artist’s naïveté in the face of unfolding political realities that were deeper and more violent than he was willing to recognize. Goncourt, who was perhaps guilty of other forms of naïveté (that the injustices faced by France’s underclass, for instance, might not lead to social convulsions), could scarcely believe the cognitive dissonance. “The newspapers see nothing in what is going on but a question of decentralization,” he wrote on March 28, “as if it had anything to do with decentralization! What is happening is nothing less than the conquest of France by the worker and the reduction to slavery under his rule of the noble, the bourgeois, and the peasant.”

Courbet had always been opposed to Jacobinism and its willfully cruel determination that the ends justify the means. But over the coming weeks, as the planned destruction of the Vendôme Column was several times delayed and Thiers’s Versaillais army got the upper hand in the military conflict, it was the Jacobins among the Communards who began to thrive.

IT WAS CLEAR BY NOW that Paris was under attack, and with Thiers unwilling to yield anything, the Commune had to defend itself. Gustave Cluseret—the U.S. Civil War veteran whom Manet and Degas had gone to hear at the Folies Bergère at the beginning of the siege—was appointed to lead them militarily. Cluseret had “a coarsely handsome face” and a “curt, uncivil manner,” according to his fellow Communard Louis Rossel. He was an experienced soldier but a chaotic leader. He created an atmosphere of “perpetual improvisation” and “fundamental incoherence,” according to a secretary who worked under him. The result was “a mob-scene where everyone commands and no one obeys.”

Cluseret realized that the same ring of forts that had previously kept the Prussians at bay would be key to defending the Commune. If he could use these forts—indispensable features of the Thiers Wall—to keep the Versaillais army at bay, the Commune could force a negotiated settlement. But Thiers, trying to smash any such hopes, continued to bombard the city from the west. In response, Cluseret placed outward-facing batteries by the Trocadéro and at Château de la Muette. Both sites were close to the Morisot home, and many of their Passy neighbors believed Cluseret put them there precisely to draw fire upon them.

The Communard soldiers under Cluseret’s command resented his attempts to impose centralized authority. This, after all, was the very thing from which they wanted to free themselves. But their principled opposition created problems on the battlefield. “Never,” said Cluseret upon taking command, “have I seen anything comparable to the anarchy of the National Guard.” They were indeed a motley, undisciplined crew. Each battalion had its own distinctive, ad hoc uniform. Most of the units were sodden with alcohol. And yet they could be surprisingly effective. When Goncourt woke up on the morning of April 12—a Wednesday—he was surprised to see Fort d’Issy still flying the Commune’s red flag. He thought the Versaillais troops had already taken it. “Why this stubborn resistance which the Prussians did not encounter?” he asked. Because they were motivated, was his answer. For the Communard fighters, class loyalties had risen above patriotism. “The common people are waging their own war and are not under the Army’s orders,” he wrote. “This keeps the men amused and interested, with the result that nothing tires or discourages or dispirits them. One can get anything out of them, even heroism.”

THIERS FOCUSED HIS bombardment on Neuilly, where artillery fire was followed intermittently by infantry attacks and street-to-street fighting, with terrible effects on a suburb that had largely been spared by the Prussians. The ground was littered with broken shells and crushed bullets. All the trees had been cut down. Beautiful houses were reduced to ruins, corpses left unburied. The bombardment ranged more widely, too. The Arc de Triomphe was hit multiple times. Even the U.S. legation, occupied by the minister to France, Elihu Washburne, was strafed with shrapnel. In Auteuil, just south of Passy, Goncourt had to run down into his cellar when he heard the nearby “whistling of several shells.” Edwin Child, a young Londoner living in Paris, saw a seventy-year-old woman having both her legs ripped off by an exploding shell. “It is becoming absolutely sickening,” he wrote. “During the siege at least people knew why they were suffering and for what end, but now it would be difficult to say which is the most preferable, the Commune or the Government. Both give such proofs of their incapacity.” On April 25 the two warring sides agreed upon an eight-hour truce to permit the evacuation of civilians trapped inside their ravaged homes in Neuilly. The medics who came in uncovered appalling scenes of starvation and suffering. The ghost of Goya had returned.

Thiers now settled on a plan that seemed more likely to succeed than the tactic of simply lobbing bombs into the city’s bourgeois suburbs. He decided to focus on capturing Fort d’Issy. From there, his forces would enter the city at Point du Jour, south of the Bois de Boulogne, where the Seine intersects the city’s perimeter. More than fifty powerful cannons were now aimed at Fort d’Issy as MacMahon’s Versaillais forces left Neuilly and swept southward.

On April 26 a meeting in Paris of Freemasons, desperate to avoid more bloodshed, voted to march from the city center right to the front lines. Five days earlier they had managed to send a delegation to meet with Thiers in Versailles, but the old statesman remained resolute. “A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed,” he said of the coming onslaught, “but the law will prevail.” So the Freemasons’ march went ahead on April 29: its participants somberly strode down the Rue de Rivoli and up the Champs-Élysées to Porte Maillot, at the northeastern corner of the Bois de Boulogne, where the cannons were still active. They held up banners calling for peace and enjoining all sides to “Love one another.” The sounds of explosions died down—but only after two Freemasons were killed.

The threat to Fort d’Issy prompted the creation in Paris of a Committee of Public Safety, a body in which emergency powers were to be concentrated. Courbet opposed it, fearing a return to the mistakes of the past. (He was thinking of the Terror.) But the proposal passed narrowly, with the support of Blanquists like Rigault and Jacobins like Delescluze and Pyat. Fort d’Issy was meanwhile being battered to a pulp by MacMahon’s cannons. On April 30 it was evacuated by its Communard commander who could wait no longer for Cluseret to send reinforcements. But just when it seemed too late, Cluseret mustered two hundred National Guardsmen and marched back to the vacant fort, yet to be occupied by the Versaillais. Inside they found a single boy, around sixteen or seventeen, weeping over a barrel of gunpowder. His plan had been to wait for the enemy to enter, then set light to the barrel, blowing up both himself and the fort. Cluseret dismissed him and regarrisoned the fort.

By now, paranoia had spread through the ranks of the Commune. Everyone was on the lookout for spies. So when Cluseret returned to the city from Fort d’Issy, he was arrested, accused of treason, and relieved of his duties. His replacement was Louis Rossel, a twenty-six-year-old soldier. Motivated more by patriotism than by class ideology, Rossel remained outraged by the city’s surrender to the Germans. After receiving a message from Versailles calling on him to surrender Fort d’Issy, he said he would shoot the next messenger carrying any similar demand.

On May 3, MacMahon’s Versaillais launched a stealth attack on a Communard camp near Fort d’Issy. Eight hundred Communards were set upon in their sleep. Fifty were killed, and a quarter taken prisoner. The National Guardsmen manning the fort itself were down to their last provisions as the guns pounded away and the Versaillais troops inched closer. The Guardsmen’s commander slipped away, leaving his subordinates to face the relentless onslaught. Hoping to save the fort, Rossel planned a counteroffensive but could not muster the twelve thousand troops deemed necessary for the task, so he abandoned the notion the next day. After a spate of defections, he chose to humiliate his officers by cutting off their sleeves, a tactic that only lowered their morale. Having squandered an authority that—given the extremity of the predicament—relied on goodwill, he resigned in disgust on May 9. Fort d’Issy fell the same day.

Bismarck was meanwhile losing patience. On May 7 he threatened to reoccupy Paris if the French government couldn’t guarantee that it would abide by the terms of the peace treaty. Civil war was making that all but impossible. But three days later, after the fall of Fort d’Issy, he was willing to take Thiers’s side in the conflict. Thiers, however, refused Bismarck’s offer to use his army to reimpose order. He knew he would never be forgiven if German troops reentered Paris. But he did agree to a formal declaration of the Treaty of Frankfurt, bringing an official end to the Franco-Prussian War.

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which is just twelve miles from the Louvre, had begun to feel too close to the chaos consuming Paris, so Berthe was sent to join Edma in Cherbourg on the Normandy coast. Spending all her time with Edma and the baby, she also began thinking about suitable subjects for paintings. It was hard to focus. She was dazed and, like all of France, in an extended state of shock. As she traveled to the coast, Cornélie sent a letter ahead to Edma, noting that “sadness has become like a second nature to [Berthe].” Édouard, too, was an exile from his own city. Unable—and by now likely unwilling—to return to his home and studio, he continued his aimless wanderings. He arrived in Tours, which, during the siege, had been the seat of France’s provisional government. News of the Commune’s fate was unreliable, but of course it was all anyone was talking about. The more Manet heard, the more dismayed he became. Stunning, that it had come to this.